Charles Glass was a Middle East correspondent for ABC News for many years. He is the author of many books about the region, including Tribes with Flags: Adventure and Kidnap in Greater Syria, as well as several books about the Second World War, including Deserter and Americans in Paris: Life and Death under Nazi Occupation 1940-44.
An Israeli Jewish woman told me a story about her father’s return, many years later, to the house in Vienna that his family had abandoned in 1938. More than any of the other possessions he had lost when Austria merged with Germany, he told her, it was his library that he missed and longed to see again. Yet the old Viennese gentleman could not bring himself to enter the flat in which he...
The old dons arrived in armourplated black limousines to pay their last respects. They had often tried to do away with him, but they gave him a royal send-off. He was, after all, the longest-serving capo of them all, a man who commanded respect. King Hussein of Jordan would have laughed to see his adversaries courting his son and heir, King Abdallah II. Spectators could almost hear Hafez al-Assad of Syria whispering into the young King’s ear: ‘Your father knew it wasn’t personal, Abdu. It was business.’ The Sicilian Mafia has much to learn from the Levantine men of honour.‘
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